Welcome new subscribers! I’m the author of The End of Burnout, and this newsletter is where I post updates about my writing and thinking about once a month. You can learn more about me and find links to all my published essays at my website. To get in touch, just reply to this message. And please share it with anyone you think will be interested.
I started to write a short followup to my most recent post, “Against Liberal Nihilism,” but it quickly became not-so-short. I’ll hold off on that topic for later this month, so as not to bury the thing I really want to tell you about right now. But I wanted to say thanks to the many people who wrote thoughtful and appreciative messages in response to the nihilism post. It seems to have struck a more positive chord than I anticipated. More soon!
The thing I really want to tell you about is a new essay I have in Notre Dame Magazine called “The Velvet Rut.” The total package of the essay, including the accompanying artwork by the painter Steve Keene, is one of the coolest things I’ve ever been a part of. I am super proud of this essay, and I hope you’ll read and enjoy it.
The eponyous rut is Charlottesville, Virginia, where I lived for eight years during and after graduate school in the late 1990s and early 2000s:
To some people — mostly well-educated white people in their 20s, like everyone who inhabited the Graves Street house at the time I did — Charlottesville was known as the Velvet Rut. It was a good place to work a light schedule and start a band. Or work a light schedule and talk about starting a band. Or spend all day playing backgammon on a coffee shop patio and all night playing foosball in a dingy sports bar, as I did for an entire summer. Like other rural college towns, Charlottesville does a booming trade in charm and nostalgia. These things are easy to sell, so it can be easy to get by, unbothered by the split-knuckle competition that people visit Charlottesville to escape. The high strivers leave town right after graduation. If you’re young and talented but averse to the meritocratic struggle for dominance, you can stick around and rest secure in your potential. There’s no rush to go out and prove yourself. You have plenty of time.
Until it occurs to you that you don’t. You reach some birthday, or you want to cash in on your degree, or you want kids or to quit drinking, and you realize you can’t do that there. It’s as if a bell rings — though it doesn’t ring for everyone, and it’s possible to ignore it indefinitely.
The essay narrates my final year in Charlottesville, beginning when I finished my Ph.D. and moved into a low-rent house where some friends already lived. When I moved in, I had no job whatsoever and $60,000 in debt. After years in graduate school, I needed to repair myself while I gave the academic job market another go. I started to build a decent, modest life that year. I worked several part-time jobs, including as a sushi chef, a tutor, and a parking lot attendant. I embarked on a promising romantic relationship. I became a much better version of myself in that house. And then, during one momentous week, it suddenly became time to leave. All the forces pushing on my life seemed to converge on the night of a Neko Case concert in February, 2005. I reacted to the convergence one way, and a good friend of mine who felt many of the same forces reacted another. I don’t regret the decision I made, but I can more clearly see now the costs of it. And I can see the sense behind my friend’s reaction, which at the time seemed totally irrational.
I’m not sure I’m selling the essay very well here. I don’t want to tell the whole story. It’s a complex story, slow at first, but the tension builds up. Just read it; you’ll see what I mean.
I don’t mention it in the piece, but that year was also when I first earned money by writing essays. Even though it would be another decade before I “became a writer,” some of the seeds of what I’m doing now were planted then. I had no idea that’s what was happening.
I wrote the first version of “The Velvet Rut” in 2018, as part of a class I took through Creative Nonfiction magazine, whose educational programs are now defunct. Two other essays I wrote that year, “Taming the Demon” and “Drinking Alone,” were published a few years ago in Commonweal and were eventually named notable in The Best American Essays volume for their years. The three essays are not exactly linked, but they do share a few common themes and symbols. All three feature valleys of one sort or other. (If a rut and a canyon are sorts of valleys.) In two of the essays, key events take place on porches: those transitional spaces between public and private. The other essay is about a monastic community that doesn’t have a porch, but that does have a 13-mile-long dirt driveway between it and the public at large.
If a writer can analyze his own work, then I’ll say that I think all three essays are about the prospect of finding refuge from the big, public world of American capitalism and its associated work ethic and cultural norms. That world has much to offer. I’m a big fan of it, generally speaking. For one thing, it’s the only world where you can get cheap sushi or teach students about Kierkegaard. But engaging with it comes at a cost. That world grinds many people down, sometimes violently so. But even if it doesn’t damage you overtly, it makes you into someone you may not want to become: a productive citizen, a corporate functionary, a cosmopolitan elite. Maybe there are places where that world can’t find you — again, at some cost. I imagine the public world as a flat, Cartesian plane/plain (like the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex), so I think of the potential refuges as hollows, often literal ones. Porches are also places of contact between bounded worlds. Can the home be a refuge? Again: Sure, but making it one will also cost you.
I suppose there is a loose chronological narrative if you read “The Velvet Rut,” “Drinking Alone,” and “Taming the Demon,” in that order. (They were published in the opposite order.) I stand on the cusp of the public world, I enter it and become disillusioned, and then I go looking for alternatives to it. Add in one of my burnout essays, and — hmm, could that be the spine of an essay collection? Literary agents: Just hit reply to get in touch.
“The Velvet Rut” was rejected 21 times before I sent it to Notre Dame Magazine. (One literary magazine that happens to be edited about a mile from my house took three years to reject it. At that point, why bother?) I had all but given up on the essay, but I guess I still thought there was something in it worth putting into the world, and the ND Mag team has always been great to work with, so I thought it wouldn’t hurt to send it their way.
I couldn’t be happier with the result. In the essay, I mention the painter Steve Keene, whose work is all over Charlottesville owing to his deep roots in town. Though Keene works obsessively, his lo-fi aesthetic reflects the aura of not trying too hard that — at the time, at least — pervaded the world I inhabited. The house on Graves Street was perhaps destined to become one of his subjects.
One of our neighbors on Graves Street had a book out earlier this year; the baker Rick Easton, co-owner of the acclaimed Bread & Salt bakery in Jersey City and the subject of this 2015 profile by Mark Bittman, is coauthor of Bread and How to Eat It. I didn’t know Rick well at the time, but I recall him as someone who really knew how to use a porch.
The country as a whole didn’t know much about Charlottesville until a violent and deadly white supremacist rally occurred there in 2017. I knew Charlottesville as a very nice place to live that sometimes felt a bit stifling in its insularity. (I believe it is still a nice place to live, though an increasingly expensive one.) I certainly haven’t written the last word on the town, and Charlottesville isn’t the only place where one can have the sort of experiences I narrate. The editors of ND Mag thought the essay spoke to something more universal.
I really hope you’ll read the essay. There is no paywall, and you don’t have to have gone to Notre Dame to read their lovely magazine. I didn’t go there, and I read and write for it. Everyone is fine with this.
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